This chapter explains how the theory and models in this volume have been used to make predictions and forecasts of significant importance in managing the Criminal Justice System. In the first ...
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This chapter explains how the theory and models in this volume have been used to make predictions and forecasts of significant importance in managing the Criminal Justice System. In the first example, it is shown that using the theory, demographics and sentencing policy (custody rates): the prison population over a period of 30 years is predicted to within 3%; and that without the “Prison Works” mantra of the early 1990s, the prison population would have continued to decline. The second example presents the results of a similar model of court workloads. The third shows how forecasts, made in the year 2000, of the size of the DNA database panned out over the subsequent 4 years.Less

Applications for Managing the Criminal Justice System

John F. MacleodPeter G. GroveDavid P. Farrington

Published in print: 2012-08-23

This chapter explains how the theory and models in this volume have been used to make predictions and forecasts of significant importance in managing the Criminal Justice System. In the first example, it is shown that using the theory, demographics and sentencing policy (custody rates): the prison population over a period of 30 years is predicted to within 3%; and that without the “Prison Works” mantra of the early 1990s, the prison population would have continued to decline. The second example presents the results of a similar model of court workloads. The third shows how forecasts, made in the year 2000, of the size of the DNA database panned out over the subsequent 4 years.

This edited book considers the values both implicit and explicit in criminology and criminal justice. Taking Becker’s influential article “Whose Side Are We On?” (1967) as a starting point, the book ...
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This edited book considers the values both implicit and explicit in criminology and criminal justice. Taking Becker’s influential article “Whose Side Are We On?” (1967) as a starting point, the book debates issues concerning sociological enquiry about deviancy and crime which, by its very nature, cannot ever be entirely neutral or objective: “We must always look at the matter from someone’s point of view. The scientist who proposes to understand society must, as Mead long ago pointed out, get into the situation enough to have a perspective on it…..We can never avoid taking sides.” Becker, 1967: 245). However, the ’sides’ that are taken in theorising and researching crime and in criminal justice practice are often inadequately acknowledged, frequently reflecting dominant thinking and discourses. This book arises from our perceptions that values and values-talk has been submerged by the instrumental demands of administrative criminology and managerial practices in both higher education and criminal justice system. The chapters open debate about crime, criminology and criminal justice from a broad spectrum of perspectives and, in so doing, poses key questions about policy, values and what is/what should be more valued.Less

Values in criminology and community justice

Published in print: 2013-09-18

This edited book considers the values both implicit and explicit in criminology and criminal justice. Taking Becker’s influential article “Whose Side Are We On?” (1967) as a starting point, the book debates issues concerning sociological enquiry about deviancy and crime which, by its very nature, cannot ever be entirely neutral or objective: “We must always look at the matter from someone’s point of view. The scientist who proposes to understand society must, as Mead long ago pointed out, get into the situation enough to have a perspective on it…..We can never avoid taking sides.” Becker, 1967: 245). However, the ’sides’ that are taken in theorising and researching crime and in criminal justice practice are often inadequately acknowledged, frequently reflecting dominant thinking and discourses. This book arises from our perceptions that values and values-talk has been submerged by the instrumental demands of administrative criminology and managerial practices in both higher education and criminal justice system. The chapters open debate about crime, criminology and criminal justice from a broad spectrum of perspectives and, in so doing, poses key questions about policy, values and what is/what should be more valued.

The conclusion brings the case of the Wilmington Ten from the overturning of their convictions into the twenty-first century when they received pardons of innocence in 2012. Returning to the reality ...
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The conclusion brings the case of the Wilmington Ten from the overturning of their convictions into the twenty-first century when they received pardons of innocence in 2012. Returning to the reality that the state of North Carolina ruined lives in order to forestall inevitable change and combat radicalism, the conclusion briefly examines what happened to the individual members of the Wilmington Ten. It also reappraises the movement to free them in light of recent scholarship on the trajectory of African American politics and black radicalism. Since this century began, North Carolina has pulsed with struggle over the types of issues that characterized the conflicts of the 1970s. Public schools have re-segregated, and state government’s support for quality education for all has been hijacked by a mania for charter, religious, and for-profit schools. Fighters for criminal justice reform have brought to light many other cases of wrongful conviction. Police misconduct, including instances of corrupt investigations, brutality and death under at best questionable circumstances, bubbles to the surface, as in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere. This and more has brought forth in North Carolina collective efforts to find solutions, including the broad-based Moral Monday movement, which has been emulated across the South.Less

Conclusion : The Tragedy of the Ten and the Rise of a New Black Politics

Kenneth Robert Janken

Published in print: 2016-01-04

The conclusion brings the case of the Wilmington Ten from the overturning of their convictions into the twenty-first century when they received pardons of innocence in 2012. Returning to the reality that the state of North Carolina ruined lives in order to forestall inevitable change and combat radicalism, the conclusion briefly examines what happened to the individual members of the Wilmington Ten. It also reappraises the movement to free them in light of recent scholarship on the trajectory of African American politics and black radicalism. Since this century began, North Carolina has pulsed with struggle over the types of issues that characterized the conflicts of the 1970s. Public schools have re-segregated, and state government’s support for quality education for all has been hijacked by a mania for charter, religious, and for-profit schools. Fighters for criminal justice reform have brought to light many other cases of wrongful conviction. Police misconduct, including instances of corrupt investigations, brutality and death under at best questionable circumstances, bubbles to the surface, as in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere. This and more has brought forth in North Carolina collective efforts to find solutions, including the broad-based Moral Monday movement, which has been emulated across the South.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, thousands of people were incarcerated in southern jails as a result of their involvement with the civil rights movement. This book follows those activists inside ...
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During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, thousands of people were incarcerated in southern jails as a result of their involvement with the civil rights movement. This book follows those activists inside the jail cell to explore the trials and tribulations of life as a civil rights prisoner. It highlights the conditions inside southern jails, activists’ interactions with “ordinary” prisoners, and the importance of race and gender in shaping the prisoners’ treatment. It also reveals how, beyond the jail cell, the movement sought to counter such repression via an ideology that embraced imprisonment as a mark of honor and a statement of resistance, while also seeking to fill the jails and thereby place financial pressure upon local government; this was encapsulated in the term “jail-no-bail.” Organizations and individuals regularly testified to the importance of incarceration as a form of induction into the movement. However, after 1963, as activists faced increasingly serious charges and served longer sentences, many struggled to maintain their commitment to the philosophy behind jail-no-bail. Beneath movement rhetoric, activists found that the earlier exuberance for jail sentences did not fit with the conditions under which they worked. Ain’t Scared of Your Jail concludes by examining the shift toward black power in the post-1965 era and demonstrates how activists, now freed from an earlier focus upon integration and respectability, began to challenge mainstream definitions of criminality to claim that black prisoners were not so much criminals as victims of a racist social structure.Less

Zoe A. Colley

Published in print: 2012-12-16

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, thousands of people were incarcerated in southern jails as a result of their involvement with the civil rights movement. This book follows those activists inside the jail cell to explore the trials and tribulations of life as a civil rights prisoner. It highlights the conditions inside southern jails, activists’ interactions with “ordinary” prisoners, and the importance of race and gender in shaping the prisoners’ treatment. It also reveals how, beyond the jail cell, the movement sought to counter such repression via an ideology that embraced imprisonment as a mark of honor and a statement of resistance, while also seeking to fill the jails and thereby place financial pressure upon local government; this was encapsulated in the term “jail-no-bail.” Organizations and individuals regularly testified to the importance of incarceration as a form of induction into the movement. However, after 1963, as activists faced increasingly serious charges and served longer sentences, many struggled to maintain their commitment to the philosophy behind jail-no-bail. Beneath movement rhetoric, activists found that the earlier exuberance for jail sentences did not fit with the conditions under which they worked. Ain’t Scared of Your Jail concludes by examining the shift toward black power in the post-1965 era and demonstrates how activists, now freed from an earlier focus upon integration and respectability, began to challenge mainstream definitions of criminality to claim that black prisoners were not so much criminals as victims of a racist social structure.

The book closes with an examination of the contemporary period, with brief discussion of several prison museums and current media access in Sing Sing prison, the subject of Chapter Four. The prison ...
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The book closes with an examination of the contemporary period, with brief discussion of several prison museums and current media access in Sing Sing prison, the subject of Chapter Four. The prison museum is a fascinating simulacrum, a semiotic frenzy that is haunting and, by public reputation, often haunted. Visitors manifestly seem to love imagining what it must be like to be incarcerated, and in many ways prisons have always functioned as de facto museums, given the large number of visitors allowed to tour facilities in the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. The conclusion also adumbrates some features of contemporary media use at Sing Sing prison, less an attempt to construct an exhaustive history of media use in prisons than to offer a snapshot of some recent changes, including the introduction of in-cell television at Sing Sing in April 2015.Less

The Prison Museum and Media Use in the Contemporary Prison

Alison Griffiths

Published in print: 2016-08-16

The book closes with an examination of the contemporary period, with brief discussion of several prison museums and current media access in Sing Sing prison, the subject of Chapter Four. The prison museum is a fascinating simulacrum, a semiotic frenzy that is haunting and, by public reputation, often haunted. Visitors manifestly seem to love imagining what it must be like to be incarcerated, and in many ways prisons have always functioned as de facto museums, given the large number of visitors allowed to tour facilities in the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. The conclusion also adumbrates some features of contemporary media use at Sing Sing prison, less an attempt to construct an exhaustive history of media use in prisons than to offer a snapshot of some recent changes, including the introduction of in-cell television at Sing Sing in April 2015.